Year: 2018

Spyro Gyra performing in Huntington, NY. Photo by Brian Friedman/B-Freed Photography.
The band Spyro Gyra has been around for over 40 years and has performed over 5,000 shows. They have recorded over 30 albums, including two gold albums and one platinum, racked up 13 Grammy nominations, and sold 10 million albums. While

Val Heideman (as Jessica Riggs) discovers Christmas lights in an attic in the Lyric
Arts Company of Anoka's upcoming production of Prancer. Photo by Twin Cities Headshots.
The Lyric Arts Company of Anoka opens its production of Prancer tonight. What is Prancer? It's the first of Lyric Arts' two holiday shows, for starters.

Matthew Rubbelke (left) as Ward the Dance Instructor and Tyler Michaels (center) as Bobby Vee. Photo by Rick Spaulding.
Each verse of Don McLean's famous song "American Pie" invokes "the day the music died". This day, February 3, 1959, has gone down in pop culture history as the tragic end of

There are certain juggernauts of the holiday performing arts world: the Mannheim Steamrollers, the Trans-Siberian Orchestras, the Very Die Hard Christmases, and the...Hip Hop Nutcrackers?
Yes, sugarplum fairies and hip-hop have married and sired a long-running holiday extravanganza. The New York Times' A.C. Lee called the result "A generous dose of

Like most Americans, Elder Price (Kevin Clay, center) and Elder Cunningham (Conner Peirson, right) couldn't find Uganda (represented by Monica L. Patton, left) on a map in The Book of Mormon. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.
As our performing arts editor likes to say, we don't do missionary work "that way" anymore. It

The cast of the National Tour of The Book of Mormon. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.
In New York City, there is rarely a better theatre recommendation to be had than at the TKTS Booth. In a city of 8.6 million, hundreds of theatre organizations, and innumerable shows opening and closing all

The cast of the 2018 Children's Theatre Company production of Dr. Seuss’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Photo by Dan Norman.
Strangely enough – despite having his heart warmed and growing upteem times and sizes – Reed Sigmund's Grinch is still unrepentently and ever-so-cantankerously making off with all the Whos' Christmas stuff. The

The cast of the Guthrie Theater’s production of Michael Frayn's classic farce Noises Off. Photo by Dan Norman.
New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich once called Noises Off “the funniest play written in [his] lifetime.” I am not sure if I would go that far, but, certainly, Michael Frayn’s 1982 farce about

The cast of the national touring company of Beautiful do the Locomotion. Photo by Joan Marcus.
There was a time when singers just sang and performed, leaving the songwriting to others. Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, and Elvis Presley did not write most of their own songs. For them, and for generations